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#3718 - Wednesday, November 18,
2009 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
We held our third Nonduality Satsang in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Saturday, November 14, 2009. Nearly 40 attended. I'm compiling summaries from the contributors. In this issue is featured James Traverse's written summary of his talk:
Constipation in Consciousness
The three key points of my presentation are: 1) Attention is the
factor of Awareness that facilitates a qualitative shift in
whatever is attended to, 2) if you have formed any idea of
who/what you are via the thinking mind then you have a dis-ease
that is a Constipation in Consciousness, and 3) you are
unthinkable yet you are.
The process of experientially communicating these three
points was facilitated by asking folks to attend to breathing
while I was speaking and I had an accomplice in the audience who
sounded a chime when I stated 'whenever you hear this sound...
attend to breathing... and explore the question, "Does
attention to breathing facilitate a qualitative shift in
breathing?"' [it is experientially self-evident that this is
the case and my conspirator sounded the chime every 3 minutes or
so to direct attention to breathing while I continued
speaking].
Once this 'principle of attention' was established as the factor
that facilitates a qualitative shift, I asked folks to direct
attention to Constipation, Consciousness and the relationship of
Content and Context. At this point I simply asked folks to help
me attend to and define these things and with their help we
discovered that Constipation is a blockage to the 'river of life'
yet the river of life does not stop which results in many other
disorders; we also discovered that there are distinct degrees or
states of Consciousness as: waking consciousness, sleep
consciousness, dream consciousness while waking or sleeping, and,
deep sleep or a medically induced sleep where the 'sleeper' in
not conscious yet it is clear that there is no discontinuity to
being while deep dreamless sleep is unfolding; Context is the
setting and Content is what's inside [in other words
Consciousness is the setting or context and the content is that
we were breathing, I was speaking, folks were attending, etc).
I then offered some parallel findings from medical science that
says that over 80% of all health disorders are linked to
constipation and because the flow of life does not stop when
there is a blockage there is a build up of pressure/stress, and,
medical scientists have also determined that over 90% of visits
to health professionals is linked to elevated levels of stress in
a person's life [these are facts that are provided by highly
acclaimed medical schools like Harvard Medical].
I finished my presentation by asking folks to use this 'principle
of attention' to see that: 1) the stress and constipation factors
generally associated with physical dis-ease are not limited to
the physical realm, 2) the irrefutable fact that the 'sleeper' is
not consciously present while deep sleep or medically induced
sleep is unfolding does not mean that there is a discontinuity in
consciousness in this situation, 3) the ongoing reminders via the
'chiming' of my accomplice means that an aspect of the content as
what is happening is breathing that is unfolding within the
context of and as life/consciousness and that these are together
like a wave and the ocean, 4) if you have made any intellectual
conclusion of who or what you are, then that idea is the
'content' that is the constipation/blockage in consciousness, 5)
the remedy for this blockage is to see the blockage [and no
longer feed it energy such that it dies of starvation], and 6)
attention reveals that you are unthinkable yet you are.
James Traverse: http://beingyoga.com
Nonduality Satsang: http://nonduality.ca